The deployment of wireless networks is a very expensive proposition. There is a direct correlation between economics and network planning. One cannot have wireless networks of infinite capacity and bandwidth. Wireless networks are designed for the pre-determined capacity and performance depending upon many factors such as geography, economics, demography, etc. All wireless networks have planned redundant or idle capacity in advance to counter any bursts or unprecedented traffic. This planning allows the operator to meet sudden demand without impacting the user experience. Alongside, many network nodes can be running licensed software which is directly proportional to planned network capacity and performance. In a nutshell, wireless network resources are planned based upon expected device behavior patterns.
If a wireless network observes step changes in utilization of network nodes by a handful of rogue or aggressive devices, negative network performance may manifest itself in various forms, such as service degradation, performance impact, network nodes running over planned capacity, service outage, etc. An example of such a rogue device is an aggressive mobile device. A mobile device shows aggressive behaviors when it is constantly trying to connect to a wireless network even though its service requests are repeatedly denied by the wireless network. A wireless network can deny or may be unable to cater to the service requests due to any number of valid or invalid reasons. For example, the wireless network may be under maintenance, the user of the mobile device has not paid the bill, certain network nodes in the wireless network are overwhelmed with service requests, the user has not subscribed for a particular service that he is trying to access, etc.
Instead of looking into the reasons for service denial, an aggressive mobile device may act unintelligently by perpetually retrying to connect. Such device behavior consumes excessive power in the mobile device, can cause an excessive signaling load on the wireless network, degrade the capacity and performance of the wireless network, and cause service outages. Aggressive behaviors can trigger a chain reaction among the network nodes in wireless networks. As a result, certain network services may be degraded or even fail. Restoring the network services is a challenging and daunting task.
Aggressive behavior may be caused by any mobile device (e.g., smartphone, Machine-to-Machine (M2M) device, etc.), including any hardware/software/firmware modules in the mobile device; e.g., a wireless modem, application and modem/modules driver script. For example, an M2M device may generally be considered a black box, which may be programmed once to run forever and does not require user intervention for its operation. It has been observed that a certain portion of M2M devices are implemented with a very aggressive service acquisition retry mechanism, which may result in network abusive behavior. With continuous, repetitive attempts to acquire specific service, these devices are occupying and wasting a large portion of network resources of the serving networks and the backend infrastructure.